Correspondence: Hilde van Wijngaarden, Digital Preservation Department Research & Development, Koninklijke Bibliotheek/National Library of the Netherlands, The Netherlands. Tel: + 31 70 3140467/+ 31 6 24808338; E-mail: hilde.vanwijngaarden@kb.nl; Web: www.kb.nl/e-depot

¹is head of the Digital Preservation Department in the Research and Development Division of the National Library of the Netherlands. Her main area of expertise is the development of preservation strategies. She studied history at the University of Amsterdam and wrote her Ph.D. at the University of Groningen (2000). In 1999, she started working as an information consultant for an IT company. Since 2002, she is working at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek where she is head of the Digital Preservation Department since January 2005. She is a member of the EU-project PLANETS Scientific Board and has contributed to several international publications and presentations.

Abstract

DAM should focus not only on storage and high-quality retrieval of digital collections, but also on digital preservation. To ensure future access to our digital collections, three actions have to be dealt with: long-term storage, registration of metadata and development of tools for accessibility. Storage media have to be refreshed regularly to safeguard the bits and bytes, and stored digital objects have to be described carefully to enable future retrieval. Apart from the description of the objects themselves, we also have to describe the technical properties of the object. Software is becoming obsolete over the years, leaving objects inaccessible for future users. Preservation strategies, like migration and emulation, have to be developed to deal with this problem. This paper describes how digital preservation has been taken up by libraries and archives with a special focus on the e-Depot at the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB).